


no way to live

by truethingsproved



Series: body lies still [3]
Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo, Tithe Series - Holly Black
Genre: (for now muahahha), Alternate Universe - Fae, F/M, Fae & Fairies, one sided Feuilly/Montparnasse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-08
Updated: 2014-03-08
Packaged: 2018-01-14 23:35:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1282801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/truethingsproved/pseuds/truethingsproved
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Instead, Anastazja Feuilly wakes up with the sun and marks another day off on the calendar. Today, when she gets to the shop, she has to call the residence to arrange for a bill payment schedule—it’s been seven years since she moved her father into assisted living, because she simply couldn’t take care of him anymore, and he wasn’t lucid enough to know either way. The nurses are willing to bend a rule here or there, and if her payments are a bit late, they look the other way. They know she does her best.</p><p>Today, when she gets to the shop, she has to find the money to pay her electric bills too. Today, when she gets to the shop, she has to wait for him to come by and pick up the only things that it matters she sell anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no way to live

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ryssabeth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryssabeth/gifts).



When Anastazja Feuilly was six years old she left home knowing that she would never see her mother again.

She couldn’t quite explain it; it was simply a feeling she had, a piece of knowledge that she knew as surely and as confidently as any. Perhaps it was because she’d been named for her mother, but the elder Anastazja (“Anka”, as her husband called her) never seemed to have the same intuition about her daughter. In fact, Anka barely seemed to know her own child most days. She spent her time staring out the window and across the sea with a fierce longing that made her ache.

Maybe she should have told her father. Now, it’s all she wants to do: go back in time to that morning to warn her father that the world would come crashing down around them. But even her friends, the ones her father warned her about and told her not to see, can’t do that for her.

When she came home from school the doors were thrown open and Anka was gone, the closet door of her bedroom thrown open and two of the floorboards torn up. There were bloodstains on the wood and scratches made by fingernails and Feuilly didn’t know what they meant but she knew that her mother was gone. She sat outside until the sky grew darker and the air bit with a chill, her cheeks flushed with pink and her hands tucked under her scarf, until her father got home.

Sometimes she thinks she should hate her mother for leaving, for the way her father simply faded into nothingness after she disappeared, for the meals she had to learn to cook on her own and the way she was forging her father’s signatures on bills by the time she was thirteen and her uncle didn’t want to do it any longer.

Instead, Anastazja Feuilly wakes up with the sun and marks another day off on the calendar. Today, when she gets to the shop, she has to call the residence to arrange for a bill payment schedule—it’s been seven years since she moved her father into assisted living, because she simply couldn’t take care of him anymore, and he wasn’t lucid enough to know either way. The nurses are willing to bend a rule here or there, and if her payments are a bit late, they look the other way. They know she does her best.

Today, when she gets to the shop, she has to find the money to pay her electric bills too. Today, when she gets to the shop, she has to wait for him to come by and pick up the only things that it matters she sell anymore.

She’s sold her soul to the devil, she knows, and she stands behind the counter with the  _closed_ sign displayed in the storefront window and a mug of watery coffee between her folded hands. She can reuse the coffee grounds two or three times before it starts to get unbearable. She’s sold her soul and she doesn’t much care. Humans, she has decided, are entirely incapable of making anything good.

Feuilly can’t stand the smell of the sea anymore and she keeps her fingernails cut too short to leave marks. She hums a mournful tune under her breath as she waits, shivering even under her three layers, waiting for him to come into her shop and push her closer to hell.

Every Thursday, at eight o’clock sharp, before she opens the shop to anyone else, Montparnasse pushes the door open with a set of orders, and every Wednesday at eight o’clock sharp, before she opens the shop to anyone else, Montparnasse pushes the door open to collect. It’s a trade that she couldn’t afford to give up even if she wanted to now. For every bit of stock she gives him, he gives her enough to pay another bill, to get groceries for next week, and—more important than the money—he gives her dreams.

She was awake nearly all night perfecting the last stock, wooden baby dolls with intricately carved mouths and runes carved on each finger and toe. She can smell him before she sees him passing the shop, the mix of incense and cigarette smoke and the coppery sweet tang of blood that seems to hang around him wherever he goes. He wears a long, black coat that covers him from his chin to his ankles, his hands shoved in gloves like they always are. Once, she asked to see his red right hand, and he pulled the glove off with his teeth, his grin feral and decidedly inhuman.

He pushes the door open and locks it behind him, as is his custom, and wordlessly Feuilly walks into the back room to collect the crate filled with stock. It’s eerie, the blank wooden eyes that stare up at her, but she ignores them, carrying them out to Montparnasse, who has left an envelope and a bottle on the counter. She never asks what he uses the stock for; she already knows, and doesn’t need confirmation that this is what’s left behind when the Seelie fae can’t be bothered to leave one of their own in place of a stolen human child. 

"Have you been eating?" Montparnasse asks with a voice that sounds almost amused, his Cheshire grin spread across his very red mouth.

"Sometimes."

"Sleeping?"

"Not last night."

She wonders how much time he spends with the Seelie—the Ly Erg are creatures of death and chaos, and spend more time with the bean sídhe than any other fae. They are not welcome in the Seelie court, obsessed as it is with beauty. Montparnasse is beautiful, she supposes, in a skeletal sort of way, his cheekbones sharp and prominent beneath his skin, his fingers too long and too graceful to be human even when he dons his glamour, but he’s not beautiful the way the Seelie appreciate, and that, she thinks, that is a travesty.

For seven years now she’s been making him stock. She can’t remember how they met, simply that they did, not long after she first moved her father into assisted living and he told her the truth, that Anka was a selkie, that she’d returned to the sea after spending seven years married to him. “Did she ever love us?” Feuilly had asked, bitterly, and her father nodded vaguely.

"Yes," he’d promised, "but she loved the sea more."

He warned her to keep her distance from the fae but Montparnasse, with his long coat and the scarf wrapped around his neck and his long, gloved hands curled around the crate of stock, Montparnasse brings her sleep and dreams, which she in turn brings to her father, now that his lucid days are few and far between. In the envelope are crisp bills that Montparnasse likely stole, enough to keep her water running for another month and to keep the lights on too, and in the bottle is the smoky grey of glamour.

(Their first interaction had set the stage for their exchange of glamour, when he’d told her to close her eyes. She felt his tongue flicker over her eyelid and when he stepped back she could see through his glamour, but only through one eye. She likes it, seeing how he really looks, compared to what he wants others to see. She thinks he likes it too.)

He gets it from the Seelie in exchange for the stock. She takes a single bottle a week for herself and her father; he must get dozens upon dozens to distribute among countless buyers, fae and human alike, but Feuilly doesn’t like to think that he smiles at any of the others like he smiles at her, the half-blood (“fae blood runs true,” he’d promised her once, almost ominously) with very careful and, despite what he says, very human hands.

They don’t thank each other. They don’t touch, they don’t linger; Feuilly knows he’s caught up in one of the solitary bean sídhe that sometimes wanders Paris when she thinks no one else can see her, and that he has no reason to stay for more than their business transactions. Instead, Montparnasse bows his head like he always does, says, “Goodbye, Anastazja,” and like always, Feuilly blinks, and when she opens her eyes he’s gone.

She uncorks the bottle and takes a pinch of the glamour out from the very top, dropping it into her coffee and stirring with a pen, before bringing the money and the glamour into the back room to shove into her bag. When the girl she hired to work Wednesdays comes in she will go home, and she will dream.

**Author's Note:**

> Goodness, it's been a while. Did you miss me? (You better have missed me >:c ) anyway, back with another part of body lies still (yaaaay), for Elizabeth! Happy birthday to my wonderful incredible amazing best friend and other half and shared star, Riza to my Roy, Grantaire to my Cosette, Cristina to my Meredith. I love you bundles <333 happy birthday, my lovely. May your year be filled with marvelous things.


End file.
